sclpls

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About sclpls

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    The play of games to come

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    SF
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    motions & procedural generation

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  1. If you look at Brough's high score for Thunderbolt Jade he uses four philosopher's stones! I'm currently right behind him on the leaderboards with a high score of 191, and I used Choco_marsh's configuration with a philosopher stone in the top right-hand corner of the board, where it is difficult to accidentally level it up. I hear you about Oko the Gnome. Because of his weakness you actually need to move around the board differently compared to how you play any of the other characters so that means for experienced players your odds of screwing yourself because of ingrained movement habits are extremely high. That being said, I still prefer that as a challenge to characters like Susannah Holy Templar, Fey Sorceress Ixxthl and Johnny of the Birds whose disadvantages just make the game much more tedious to play. I think it is gonna take awhile before people discover truly abusive combos with the charge mechanic, although I think the flow of the game state will be somewhat constant where it makes the mid game a lot more challenging, but the late game considerably easier. 868-HACK is neat, but there are some hidden mechanics in the game that once I found out about them put me off the game in a pretty big way. Still worth playing for a couple of bucks though.
  2. Yes, it has been wonderful to return to Imbroglio, a game that isn't as immediately satisfying as Cinco Paus, but that I think is the deeper and better game overall. This expansion is absolutely crazy (in a good way), and it has been a real pleasure trying to tease out how to use the new weapons.
  3. Telltale Troubles

    I think Telltale is a perfectly cautionary story about the sort of Faustian bargain that happens when a company takes VC money to succeed.
  4. Missions that made you quit

    That GTA Vice City mission is what came to my mind when I saw this thread.
  5. Into the Breach and Cinco Paus (where I am in a one sided competition with Chris Remo that unfortunately I've been on the losing end of for the last two weeks I think) are the games that have completely dominated my time lately. Really enjoying games that just have a really tight grid space so that even with all the random configuration elements end up having this puzzle-like quality to them. It is great when you have actions/effects that can cause chain effects because in that kind of densely designed space the opportunity for those crazy sequences to fire off is really high.
  6. So far my favorite mech squads have been the Blitzkreigs and the Flame Behemoths. I especially like the Flame Behemoths. Setting the whole map on fire is so satisfying, although they do have a lot of trouble dealing with the burrowing monsters. Also personally the pilot dialog really works for me in terms of just doing some little things to bring out characters. I don't know why, but I never really developed any attachment to any of the crew members in FTL, they were just little mindless automatons to me. This isn't really a criticism of FTL since I know a lot of people did develop an attachment to them, imagining backstories, and stuff like that. Just interesting how these different approaches will work for some people and not others.
  7. I played an hour of the game before I left for work this morning. I started on easy because I learned my lesson from FTL hahaha
  8. The return of Tone Control is why the release of Tacoma was doubly exciting!
  9. GOTY of the Year

    For me it is Prey. A lot of good games this year, but nothing in my mind comes close to it. I've waited so many years to play something that feels like a proper spiritual successor to System Shock, and I'm so grateful that Arkane made something this wonderful.
  10. bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies

    There is a lot of focus these days on the crypto-currencies themselves, but I think the governments need to pay more attention to the blockchain tech that makes the crypto-currencies possible. Right now there are multiple companies in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley that are working to create blockchains that would easily enable the packaging, slicing, and repackaging of opaque financial instruments without the sort of regulatory oversight those instruments would typically receive. For anyone familiar with the details of the last financial crisis, that should set off a ton of alarm bells. All of which is to say that since the U.S. federal government has been taken over by a clown show, there are a lot of very bad things approaching on the horizon.
  11. Opus Magnum, Or: Zachtronics For The Rest Of Us

    I look forward to feeling really dumb when I get a chance to play this.
  12. Episode 408: Tooth and Tail

    There are a couple of units that are designed to deal with Tier 1 spam. Skunk, Boar, and Fox can all annihilate an opponent's army that has overcommitted to T1 spam. Most defensive structures help mitigate T1 spam as well. It's really hard for Tier 1 units to push efficiently into the enemy base with a well placed turret.
  13. Episode 408: Tooth and Tail

    I've seen a lot of comparisons to Sacrifice too because of the commander unit, although I never played Sacrifice so I'll defer to others on the validity of those comparisons. I think it is a real shame that most of the panel didn't really engage with the multiplayer component of the game. Whatever happened to the 3MA attitude of "who are all these weirdos that play the single player campaign of RTS's?"? Because I think the multiplayer is where T&T really shines. Meanwhile the single player campaign felt like an awful slog to me. I didn't really pay much attention to the storyline, but in Tom Chick's interview with Andy he said the dark nature of the story was just because nature is cruel and violent. He used the aesthetics of the Russian Revolution as an obvious comparison, but I don't think he necessarily had some concrete political or historical argument he was advancing. That's probably why it came across as "muddled" to the panel. I think the multiplayer matches feel just as thrilling and exciting as watching a pro Starcraft 2 match, but obviously it doesn't demand nearly as much from the player to reach that level. The quickness of the matches means you learn similarly quickly. It also has an excellent replay system to facilitate learning. Got stomped by someone, and don't quite understand what happened? You can watch the replay and copy some stuff they did the next match. I'd also add that ranked matchmaking so far has felt pretty balanced to me, and most people I've spoken to. I gather that it gets weird once you get towards the top of the leaderboard, but when you're starting out everything is fine. T&T might have a smaller playerbase than some other games with bigger budgets behind them, but because of the brevity of the matches you can get into a match quickly, and the odds are you'll be playing against someone at a similar skill level to your own. The difficulty people have starting out is that new players don't really know how to defend their bases properly, so that's always going to be an issue. When I started playing ranked matches I was able to win the majority of games by just rushing lizards. As you rank up you start playing against people that know what they're doing, and that stops being effective, but you can go far when starting out while playing against people that don't scout properly, do weird things like rush T3 warrens, etc. The effectiveness of T1 rushes also got mitigated by the buff to the HP of warrens, although that doesn't do much good if players make bad choices about where to place their warrens. For people that want to check out the strategic depth of the game I recommend following chipfromouterspace and Zeno_Akoop on twitch. They are top tier players, and you can learn a lot from watching them play to understand how you should think about your approach to the game because they are really good at narrating their thought processes. They also play whatever compositions they feel like. So contra what someone on the panel was suggesting, the game actually has a ton of flexibility in terms of viable strats you can run. Anyway, I think anyone that ever thought pro SC matches were cool, but it's never something they thought they could get into should check out T&T. For years I thought the RTS genre was just not something I really could play anymore. It turns out I just needed to play one where being able to learn the strategy wasn't a complex task, and didn't have some crazy demands on the APM it expected out of the player.
  14. Guess you Steam top 10 most played

    My guesses: 1. Dota 2 2. XCOM: EU 3. Dishonored 2 4. Prey 5. XCOM 2 6. Spelunky 7. Civ 5 8. Thief 9. Hitman 10. EU4 My actual list: Pretty close! I hadn't realized I had spent that much time on Dark Souls 3 but I guess it makes sense since I got about mid way through the game, and then picked it back up at some point and started a new playthrough. I almost picked Rocket League but thought it was probably around no. 11. A lot of the recent immersive sims games are high up on my list because I'll play one, and then my wife will play it as well.